Liberty for Whom? David M. Kennedy on Patrick Henry: The Revolution’s master orator saw freedom in states’ sovereignty, not federal control. (David M. Kennedy, August 25, 2026, Freedom Frequency)
But what about that word “liberty”? My callow and rambunctious adolescent brain understood it to mean personal freedom, the kind of autonomy that latter-day libertarians assert as an unalienable individual right.
I’ve come to believe that my youthful understanding was not entirely wrong, but it was seriously incomplete, arguably even mistaken in its fundamentals. Properly understood, Henry’s concept of liberty indeed embraced at least a qualified sense of individual prerogatives, of the sort that Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But for him the essential, foundational concept of liberty was a collective attribute, the sacred right of organic communities—or, more precisely, majorities in such communities—to govern themselves without outside interference, and sometimes even to subordinate individual welfare to the will of the larger community.